Cable girl

I was idly flicking around when suddenly, there they were, just as they had been in 1986. The 21 years I have lived since then tapered to a palpitating point and vanished. David and Amy, Linda and Robert, on their two-week holiday on a cardboard set in Marbella. Proust had his madeleines. I have Duty Free. The two years of its run rushed unstoppably back to me. I fell to the floor, gasping.

The programme about a man, David (Keith Barron), who devotes his post-redundancy holiday to lusting after a married woman in the hotel and metaphorically kicking his wife Amy (Gwen Taylor) in the teeth every time he walks past remains a comedy in name only. Its black heart pulses as strongly as it did when I watched it aged 10, open-mouthed with horror.

Gwen Taylor knew it was a sangria-stained tragedy masquerading as comedy. Amy's dark eyes filling with pain every time David scuttled off to one of his oh-so-secret assignations with posher, blonder Linda haunted me for hours after the credits rolled every week. This, this was what life holds in store for us, I thought. You can fall in love, marry, live together happily for years, then realise that he will gladly smash it all for the chance to shag a Linda, just because she has highlights instead of a perm, just because she has a limitless collection of halterneck dresses instead of two elasticated skirts, just because, above all, she isn't you. This is what men are. This is what marriage is.

And I knew this then and now because of one simple fact: David was played by Keith Barron, who is one of the creepiest actors in the business, more profoundly unsettling and repellent than Ian McShane, George Costigan and Hywel Bennett COMBINED. Duty Free is not a sitcom, ladies. It is a presentiment, a warning, a dark and coded message about fate. The closest it comes to comic effect is in the harsh, dry, mirthless barks of those who try bravely to laugh in the face of destiny.